About Me

I was a reporter and columnist for 40 years for a chain of newspapers in the suburbs of Chicago. I'm a military veteran having served in the United States Army Combat Engineers (Cpl. E-4) and a Korean War veteran with an Honorable Discharge from the Armed Forces of the United States of America

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Mitt Romney, Republican candidate for POTUS, has found himself in deep doo-doo when he criticized President Obama over the manner in which he handled the murder of J. Christopher Stevens, U.S. Ambassador to Libya, and three other staff members. Romney found fault with a news release from a staff member at the U.S. embassy in Egypt that suggested a video that a Conservative pastor from a little known 50 person church in Florida had released over You Tube and caused some of the Muslim population in Egypt to rise up in protest and storm the embassy in Cairo, Egypt. Romney, who has zero experience in the foreign policy field except for his role as a Mormon Missionary which found him in Paris, France for two years so he could avoid the Vietnam War draft also failed to mention the Afghanistan war when he accepted the nomination for President at the Republican Convention.

Romney thought the press release by the embassy staff member in Cairo, Egypt was "apologizing" to the people of Egypt was inappropriate, but Romney didn't realize the attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya didn't happen until six hours later, and the body of Ambassador Stevens wasn't discovered until eleven hours later at a hospital in Libya where he had been taken by Libyans friendly to the United States. President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both spoke of the deaths of the U.S. embassy employees, but neither of them mentioned the confused and inaccurate comments made by Mitt Romney. Even though Romney was caught lying about the attack he came back the next day and doubled-down on his initial remarks and went even further attacking President Obama for not offering more protection for embassy staff, and even suggesting military action on Libya shouldbe taken. Romney, who pulled out all the stops to avoid the military draft during the Vietnam War, is surrouded by neocons from the Bush/Cheney administration who are always looking to go to war with Iran, Syria, North Korea or any other country they contend is a threat to the security of the United States.

The upshot is if Mitt Romney is elected President he will not be able to carryout all his military intervention into all the countries he assumes are a threat to the United States without re-instating the military draft because our present military force is stretched to the breaking point after the Iraq war and conducting the Afghanistan war which is now in its 11th year. Mitt Romney is a "war hawk" who is surrounded by "chicken hawks" who never served a day of their lives in the military, but are looking for any excuse to go to war with any country that doesn't live up to their twisted thinking.